... found it. Wow - it was truly beautiful. This Ottoman Mosque took 8 years to build in the 1500's and is the largest in Istanbul. I spent a bit of time in there, soaking up the peacefulness. By 4pm I was pretty tired as I had been walking since 9am with a brief lunch stop, but I made it to the tour along with some nice people from Dublin and the US (the Dubliners came to Istanbul for the weekend....how lucky are they!). The tour took 3 hours from 4pm to 7pm and ...

... Also these are pictures from my phone the camera ones will go up later. I hope you enjoy the selfies. We left Copenhagen yesterday morning and were greeted on the plan with traditional Turkish music to get us in the right mindset. The food on the plan was amazing but I think our loud group stood out a little bit. We landed in Istanbul at 4 pm and took a bus over to our hotel. Inside the bus we met our tour guide for the trip who proclaimed himself our ...

... which is a beautiful city, I attracted a small crowd which led to a number of garbled conversations about me and my bike, which also included my first request from a 5yr old boy to sit on my bike, which I duly fulfilled.

I set off again and noted that the road signs were both in Cyrillic and English. This was my first taste of what I am sure awaits me in the Caucuses and the Stans and it was unnerving because without the English translation I would have surely got ...

After a 9 hour flight to Istanbul from Dar Es Salaam with little to no sleep we finally arrived safe and sound to begin the next chapter of our journey. Having just left a humid 32 degree Dar in our summer clothes we questioned our sanity when we looked outside the aeroplane window to see clumps of left over snow and not a patch of blue in the sky. As soon as we got off the plane we checked through customs and went immediately to ...